


Dear Caught in the Deadlights

by TheodoreBear



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Deadlights (IT), Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Fix-It, I mean like. 27 years of yearning? I'd be sad too sis, IT: chapter 2 spoilers, Love Confessions, M/M, Truth or Dare, r + e
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-17 10:07:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21052625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheodoreBear/pseuds/TheodoreBear
Summary: Beverly Marsh saw it all in the Deadlights back in '89. In 2016, Richie Tozier is caught and, in a bright and hazy vision, he sees his best friend since childhood die. He won't let that happen.





	Dear Caught in the Deadlights

“Hey, fuckface! You wanna play truth or dare?!” Richie screamed out. The rock gripped in his hand scraped his palm as he held it tight, staring down that damned fucking clown, now twenty feet tall and with eight legs. “Here’s the truth: you’re a sloppy bitch!”  
It turned to face him, and Richie let out a breathy, anxious laugh. “Yeah that’s right, let’s dance!” He challenged It, lifting his arm back and winding up a throw. “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfu--”

He was caught.

His jaw fell slack and his eyes rolled back into his head, his limbs dangling limp as Pennywise opened its teeth-covered mouth and the three lights laid their sights on Richie. He couldn’t see anything, anyone, other than a brightness he couldn’t blink away from. His feet were brushed off the ground but he wasn’t falling. He was being lifted.

When he would fall, it would take him a moment to recover. He would feel something brush his face, shake him, brush against his lips. His eyes would open and there, leaning over him, would be Eddie Kaspbrak. The same Eddie Kaspbrak that he’d remember from twenty-seven years ago, fighting off a clown with and for. He’d remember every hammock argument, every flair of arcade video game adrenaline, every isolated and private moment in photo booths and on lone rooftops. In the center of the cavern, It would be wailing and screeching, a steel pike plunged into its mouth.  
“Rich!” Eddie’s voice would call out to him, bringing him forth and back into reality. “Rich! Hey, Rich, wake up!” Richie Tozier’s eyes would open. Eddie’s words would be fast and barely comprehensible to any stranger, but this is Richie’s first love that would be rambling above him. Eddie would cheer when Richie’s gaze lands on him. “Hey, Richie, listen! I think I got it, man! I think I killed it!”  
Richie would feel overwhelmed, he felt it in his chest. His heart would throb and his pulse would race and he would finally feel a surge of relief that his body had been lacking for the past few days in Derry.   


“I DID! I think I killed it for r--!”

And then he would hear that noise. That  _ fucking  _ noise. He would see the spider-esque arm of It jab it’s way through Eddie’s chest, inches from digging it’s sharp edge into Richie’s face. He would feel Eddie’s blood drip down the side of his cheek, and see the red spray on his glasses. He would feel his heart shatter as Eddie would look down at him, blood spilling from lips that he’d felt moments prior.  
And then he fell.

When he landed, he heard the horrific screeching from the monster. The ground took all the air from him and left him coughing, his eyes still blurred but out of whatever it was that had just held him hostage. He felt a gentle hand brush fingertips across his cheek, and it felt like another bizarre case of deja vu. Two hands gripped his shoulders, shaking him with distant words that he couldn’t quite place. Then a kiss was placed on his lips, so faint that he’d miss it if he wasn’t waiting for it. He choked out a gasp and his eyes opened, those three spinning lights finally out of his head. “Rich!” Eddie cried out, and Richie remembered this. His mind was dazed and he stared up at Eddie Kaspbrak, his childhood best friend and a man he hadn’t seen in twenty-seven years up until a few days ago. Eddie’s words flew by above him, but they sounded different. There wasn’t anything else wailing in the background. His eyes looked away, and he saw Ben and Beverly rush out from a cavern crevice. They were staring at something. When he looked back to Eddie, that warm feeling hovering in his chest dropped cold as he spotted the monstrous limb. It was almost like it was staring at Eddie.

It dove. Quick.

But Richie moved quicker.

His hands flew up to dig into Eddie’s arm, grabbing his jacket sleeves and flinging him to the side. Eddie instinctively grabbed him, pulling Richie along while It’s appendage stabbed into the ground. The two hit a boulder, heaving side by side and holding on to one another. Ben and Beverly, bless them, caught It’s attention, veering It away from Eddie and Richie. Richie bled, the arm of his coat torn, caught by when It dove at them. He looked to Eddie, who had a panicked look in his eyes.  
“You alright?” Richie asked, his voice hoarse and quiet.  
“Are you kidding me?” Was the response.

  
  


It was dying, Bill knew. Finally.  
That damned clown was shriveled up, cowering in a corner of the rocks that surrounded them. The Losers stared him down as he began to, what it seemed, become ash and drift in the wind. Quiet swallowed the cavern, something that felt almost foreign to the four that stood. The roof rumbled and the walls of stone shook, and Ben spoke out.  
“Guys?”  
The others looked his way. “Where’s Richie and Eddie?”  
Panic set in. The two names were hollered out into the echoing hollow, shouted past the creaking and crackling of decayed, falling foundation. They had to run. They had to escape back through the sewers, back up through the well. The four escaped the Neibolt house that they dreaded to enter as children, still haunted in their hearts about what had happened at the location. They watched it crumble; they watched it collapse on itself and its ruins drop into the cavern below. They were still screaming out their names.

  
  


Despite the daylight that shone when the four Losers bolted from Neibolt, it was night when they emerged from the sewers. Two grey-water-soaked men tumbled from a pipe that sent them into the Barrens. They coughed water from their lungs, keeled over and barely alive. Dust coated their backs and an uncomfortable smell of decay clung to their clothes. One collapsed to sit in the river water and paused his choking to laugh. He took his glasses off, threw them at the creek and laughed. The other man looked up at him, his face bandage missing and his red jacket turned brown. He shot his childhood best friend an odd look, but began to laugh as well. He joined him in the water, laughing at what they had just survived and praying that the four Losers escaped safe.  
“Where are we?” Eddie spoke then, faintly.  
“Ah…” Richie paused, looking around. He reached for his glasses, propped up and now cracked against a rock. “The… The Barrens?”  
Eddie looked at the pipe they ran from and let out a hearty laugh. He recognized it; he remembered himself standing outside the sewer with Stan and arguing with Richie. Staph infections, he recalled. “Holy shit,” Eddie muttered with a smile. “Holy fuck, we’re at the Barrens.” And he still laughed again.

It was the craziness of it that they found overwhelming. They found it hilarious, laughable, that they had just survived something traumatically unsurvivable. They had reunited on a whim at a Chinese restaurant, fought off an old childhood bully, and escaped a slaughtering clown all in the span of two days. And they were alive. It was bizarrely poetic, Richie thought, maybe something about how one’s greatest fears can be defeated with the ones that the fears were developed alongside with. Or maybe he's just stoned out of his mind, still in California. He was hoping he was actually there, in Maine, laughing in a dirty creek with his childhood best friend. He was there, really, and that made him ecstatic.

“How do we get home?” Eddie said softly. Richie was caught up in himself that he didn’t notice that Eddie’s laughter had faded behind a frown.  
He moved so he sat beside Eddie on the shoreline of the river, the two of them shivering and smelling of filth. Richie let out a soft hum, slinging a sliced arm around Eddie’s shoulders in a comforting manner. “Well, after 27 years, the Barrens hadn’t moved, has it?”  
“Well, with erosion, it might have--”  
“Sooo… We can still find our way back into town. We’ll be alright.”  
Eddie seemed to frown deeper, slumping to lean against Richie. Richie was caught off guard for a moment, only a moment, and rested his chin on the top of the other’s head. “Something gotcha down, Eds? Was fleeing from a clown not the highlight of your year?”  
Eddie scoffed, and didn’t comment on the nickname that he knew he hated from childhood. He shook his head. “When I say home, I’m not talking about the townhouse.”   
“Then what’re you talking about?”  
“I-I mean New York! I mean LA, for you!” Eddie paused, rubbing away the sewer water that still wet his face. “I didn’t know what I was thinking. I packed for Derry like I was planning on never even going  _ back _ to Queens!”

Richie hesitated.

“Then why don’t you?”  
“What, go back?”  
“No,  _ not _ go back.”  
Eddie sat up, but didn’t have an answer.  
“What makes you not want to go back to New York?”  
“...Can we not talk about this now? Can we go back to the townhouse first?”  
“I think this is a perfect opportunity to talk about this now.”  
Despite his obvious protest, Eddie didn’t make a move to stand or shift away from Richie.  
“I doubt you’ll understand, Rich.”  
“Try me.”  
“Well, you aren’t married. Why is that?”  
“Why aren’t I married?”  
“Yeah.”  
Richie blew a breath from his nose. “Still hung up on someone.”  
“An ex?”  
“I wish. We never dated. Call that my one regret.”  
“You’re hung up on someone you never dated?”  
“You’ll be surprised, Spaghetti.”

Eddie leaned back against Richie’s shoulders, unconvinced but still stubborn.  
“So it’s your wife?” Richie guessed, nudging him.  
“And what if it is? Is there a problem?”  
“Nah. There’s tons of people in unhappy marriages. It just takes a lot of bravery to get out of ‘em.” Richie heard Eddie let out a thin breath through clenched teeth. “I said it back there, Eds, and I’ll say it again: you’re a lot braver than you think.”  
“Thanks, Rich,” Eddie mumbled, sitting back up. He wiped his muddy hands on his jeans, though he thought he just made his hands dirtier. “Do you remember that crush, at least? Were they in Derry?”  
“Yeah, they were.” Richie looked at Eddie with a frown, but a loving glint in his eyes. Eddie looked to him, his heartbeat suddenly caught in his throat but unaware of the thought behind it. Eddie had a crush once, too, but he never remembered until two days ago for the first time in twenty-seven years.   
“Do you finally want to go back to the townhouse? Announce that we’re not dead despite public assumption?” Eddie joked it off.  
“Can I show you something first?”

  
  


It was nearby, Richie Tozier remembered that much.  
Eddie jumped at the click of the pocket knife being opened as they climbed out of the woods and onto a gravel road. Little was down the path was a rickety red bridge, wooden banisters barricading the road in and away from the forest. Keeping them in, and keeping whatever out.  
“The…” Eddie spoke cautiously. “The Kissing Bridge? I forgot about this place.”  
Richie let out a dry laugh. “I think we all had, don’t sweat it.”  
“This really what you wanted to show me?” Eddie’s eyes scanned the carvings in the banisters, some chipped and faded but others carved recent and fresh. Generations of feelings piled up in one isolated spot. Weeds around the fence posts grew taller than the banisters themselves, this part of the town forgotten and lost in history books and fairy tales. A renewal was long overdue.  
“Not  _ just _ what I wanted to show you,” Richie’s voice caught him off guard for a moment, making Eddie’s glance shoot over to where Richie was now crouched by a wooden railing. Eddie’s heart rate picked up.   
“Oh, dude, you carved out your crush? Are you kidding me?” He spoke through a laugh, stuffing his hands into his jacket pockets and walking up behind Richie. He watched Richie carefully trace the knife over the  _ R _ and the  _ + _ , but his heart leapt into his throat as the second letter was carved over. 

_ E. _

Eddie let out a nervous laugh, and Richie tensed. 

“Oh my God,” Eddie bumbled, “Oh my God, you can’t-- I’m--” He held out his palm for the pocket knife. Richie anxiously looked up at him, a red blush covering his face, but placed the knife in Eddie’s hand. Eddie then got on his knees, right beside Richie, and leaned down to the bottom fence railing. Slightly further away and below from where the  _ R + E  _ was reborn in the wood, he cut out a renewed version of a carving he did when he was thirteen. The blade revived a messy heart in the banister, and in the middle, a blocky letter.

An  _ R. _

Richie let out a laugh of his own.  
“Holy fuck, we’re stupid,” he muttered, looking away from the carving and to Eddie. “So, uh, guess we both have crushes we aren’t over.”  
Eddie stood, taking Richie by the hand and pulling him up. “Alright, before we go back to the townhouse, I wanna play a game.”  
“A game?” Richie scoffed. “What game?”  
“Truth or dare,” Eddie said, and when he saw Richie’s smile drop, he continued, “I want to ask you: truth or dare?”  
“I always picked dare,” Richie recalled. “Remember high school when I jumped off Bill’s roof into his pool?”

Eddie laughed. “Do you pick dare now?”

“I do.”

Eddie gently held onto both of Richie’s hands, intertwining their fingers and stepping an inch closer to him. He looked up at him, a height difference he remembered always hating, and asked. “I dare you to kiss me.”

Richie smiled, and that was the first dare in twenty-seven years that he had not hesitated on.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there! hmu on tumblr at theodore--bear, or at teddy-tozier for more IT related things. <3


End file.
